Talk Between PLO, Local Jewish Group Stirs Uproar

The revelation of a secret meeting between local Jewish leaders and a high-ranking official of the Palestine Liberation Organization has set off a bitter controversy within the Los Angeles Jewish community.

Critics within the community say that any contact with the PLO could only aid an organization that is seen as hostile to Israel.

But those who took part in the meeting with Khalid Hassan, one of PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s closest associates, defended it as an exchange of views that might help the Middle East peace process.

Although the meeting between Hassan and about a dozen officials of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles was held at the end of January, word of it only spread in recent weeks.

Critics called on those who took part to resign their positions at the federation, a fund-raising and policy-making organization that represents more than 500 Jewish groups, and others threatened to withhold financial contributions as a sign of protest.

“These are not people who represent me, even though they purport to, and I’m at best embarrassed at what they did,” said Jonathan Mitchell, a member of the federation’s Middle East commission, who called himself “one of the rabble-rousers.”

On Friday, federation President George Caplan said that the meeting with Hassan had been a mistake.

“Meetings with the PLO by leaders of an organization like ours will always be misconstrued and convey the wrong message,” Caplan said, adding that he had turned down an invitation to join the meeting.

He said he welcomed a decision by the federation’s Middle East commission to consider guidelines that would bar such contacts.

But Rabbi Harvey Fields of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, chairman of the commission, said he would “feel regret” if news of the meeting were to be used “as a source of divisiveness or as a means of hurting the efforts of the Jewish community.”

Fields was one of about a dozen leaders who talked with Hassan in a 32nd-floor law office in Century City. Participants agreed to keep it secret, and the Jewish officials who were there said they went as private citizens.

The meeting has since been mentioned in Palestinian newsletters, according to Cap-lan.

The participants said that Hassan, who is chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s legislative body, blamed Israel for the failure to reach a peace settlement in the Middle East, and that they told him the PLO would have to negotiate with the Israeli government.

“I just went to listen because I wanted to be informed, and nothing, nothing, nothing happened,” said Dorothy Goren, a former president of the federation. “He just gave the old PLO line.”

“I think if anything, people came away with more of a resolve of support for Israel,” said Robert J. Gerst, the attorney who provided the meeting room.

The debate over contacts with the PLO in Los Angeles reflects disagreements over how to involve the Palestinians in the peace process that helped bring down the coalition government in Israel last week, participants said.

“It hasn’t been legislated by anybody in the Jewish community that you’ll be excommunicated if you speak to anybody in the PLO,” said Havi Scheindlin, chairman of the National Peace Now Committee, an American group that supports compromise-minded political movements in Israel. Contact with the PLO is illegal under Israel’s anti-terrorist laws.

“That’s the rule in Israel, not here,” said Scheindlin, who met with Hassan in a separate session during his Los Angeles visit.

But Jack Simcha Cohen, president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis, said the contacts amounted to “aiding and abetting the enemy.”

“I know many of them, and they are some of the strongest advocates and lovers of Israel that you could believe, and that’s why I’m somewhat shocked,” he said.

As word of the unofficial meetings spread, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, resigned his seat on the commission last week in protest.

He said that the contact with Hassan was especially galling because it came at a time when Arab states and the PLO are trying to block the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

“It’s the wrong signal to send to the Arab world,” Cooper said. “Their image is being enhanced in America despite the fact that they are involved in a campaign to deprive Soviet Jews of their rights.”

In response, Stanley Sheinbaum, an economist and publisher who met with Arafat in 1988 and helped arrange the recent meetings, said that contacts would have been criticized even if Soviet Jewry were not an issue.

“What I don’t understand is that there are any number of people who purport to want peace, and then they throw up every obstacle to moving toward peace,” he said.